Faelorehn (20 page)

A sob left my chest, and I clutched my arms around my waist.  I had to get away from this portal, this cave to the Otherworld, before I was tempted enough to run after him.

I arrived home to find the house empty.  Good. I couldn’t face my family now, not after everything I had just learned.  I got undressed, took a long, hot shower, and then got into bed.  I was immensely glad that tomorrow was Saturday because there was no way I could face my friends in the morning.  I would need the weekend to recover and decide what I was going to do next.  No, I would not sit back and just let some Otherworldly thing kill or kidnap me, but according to Cade, the odds definitely were not in my favor.

-Sixteen-

Depressed

Naturally, I was depressed all that week.  Tully and Robyn asked me constantly what was wrong, but I merely shrugged and mumbled some lame excuse.  They told me that I’d been acting strange for weeks and insisted I tell them what was bothering me.

“Is it some guy?” Robyn asked as she sucked the last of her soda through a neon bendy straw.

I drew in a breath then shook my head. 
Well, yes and no,
I thought to myself. I couldn’t tell them everything I knew even if I wanted to.  I wasn’t the only one involved at that point and even if I was, they would finally see me as everyone else did: a freak.

Okay guys, do you really want to hear the truth?  I’m not human after all.  Nope, I’m Faelorehn, from the Otherworld.  Immortal.  Remember that huge raven that tried to kill me?  Yeah, it was from the Otherworld too, and apparently I’m some freakish, demon-god half-breed that may or may not inadvertently destroy the structure of the Otherworld, so you might want to keep your distance in case any other rogue faelah are after me.  Oh, and you were right about the guy.  He’s the one who told me all of this, but it doesn’t matter, because he is perfect and has the most amazing eyes and he might die any day now trying to keep all these Otherworldly creepy crawlers away from me.

I didn’t say it out loud of course.  No, I didn’t have the guts to, and Tully and Robyn wouldn’t believe me anyway.  But thinking about Cade made me suddenly miserable and embarrassed at the same time.  He must think I’m a huge threat and a complete waste of time.  My cheeks started to warm as I recalled how foolish I had acted around him.

Robyn smacked me in the back and laughed, “I knew it!”

“Robyn!” Tully growled, “Can’t you see she’s depressed?”

I blinked up at them, confused.  My internal tirade had sapped my attention for the last minute or two.  Then I remembered what Robyn had asked me before and my blush deepened.  They wanted to know about Cade.

“Oh, sorry,” Robyn said.  She crumpled her can and chucked it to the nearest recycling bin.  “Wanna talk about it?”

I gave her a glare and shook my head.  That was Robyn’s way of saying, ‘Please give me the details!’

“Oh, come on, it will make you feel better,” she insisted, patting me this time instead of smacking me.

“No, really, it isn’t what you think,” I blurted.  Liar.  It was exactly what she thought.  Sort of.  I was miserable because I liked a boy and he didn’t like me back.  Ugh, that was a lie too.  If only it were that simple.

“Is it someone who goes to school here?” Robyn grimaced as she said it, knowing how we both felt about the boys at our high school.

“Robyn, she doesn’t want to talk.  Remember what happened the last time we bugged her about one of her crushes?”

Despite my focus on the downward spiral my life had become, I cringed at the memory.  It had been in junior high and the boy of my dreams had been inconveniently walking by when I blurted his name out as my secret crush to my pestering friends.  I tried to fake illness for the rest of the week, but Mom would have nothing of it.  The weeks that followed had been some of the worst of my life.  I had a bad feeling that one of these days I would end up looking back and laughing at how insignificant they were, but I had an even nastier feeling that worse situations loomed ahead.  The bell announcing the end of lunch rang and I was brought back to the present.

“Oh, fine!” Robyn complained. “But you’re going to have to spill the beans eventually.  Oh!  Maybe at our Beltaine festival in a few weeks!  It will be the perfect time to divulge anything to do with romance.” She winked and skipped off in the direction of her next class.

“Beltaine?” Tully asked, looking confused.

“May first.  It’s a Celtic festival that celebrates the beginning of the light half of the year, or the start of spring,” I said.

Tully stopped and looked at me in surprise. “How do you know that?”

I paused outside the door to our math class.  I had forgotten that, for the past several months, I had kept my research of the Celtic world a secret from my friends.  Because, let’s face it, they would wonder at my sudden interest in the myths and legends of the ancient people of Ireland.  I cursed myself.  How could I be so careless?  Oh yeah, duh.  Gloom and doom headed my way soon,
and
the stupid side effects that resulted from pining after a guy.

“Um, well, Robyn went off on a tangent the other day after she dropped you off after school.”

I smiled, but the look Tully gave me told me she wasn’t convinced.  The tardy bell rang and as Mr. Skaring glared at us as we took our seats, I was grateful.  It meant Tully couldn’t question me further and I was certain that the oh-so fascinating world of pre-calculus would bludgeon any memories of the past hour out of her mind.

* * *

I didn’t see Cade for the rest of the week or for the rest of the next week either.  I was partly relieved, for the distance from him gave me time to sort through my turbulent feelings.  He had said he only thought I
might
be half Fomorian and half Tuatha De.  Maybe he had been wrong and maybe this whole thing was a huge misunderstanding and an overreaction on his part and on mine as well.  Perhaps he had figured out his error and was now talking with the Faelorehn being who kept sending ravens and demons after me.

Even if all that were true and I didn’t have to worry about the threat of impending death, that didn’t help with the way I felt about Cade.  I tried, for the umpteenth time, to convince myself that it was just a silly crush I had on him and that it would soon pass.  He was too old for me anyway, and I’d be going off to college in a year.  Then I remembered that I probably
wouldn’t
be going off to college, since I wasn’t human, and that I would most likely be going to the Otherworld instead.  That is, if I could prove I really wasn’t a threat to their society.  That got the emotional rollercoaster going all over again.

Robyn’s Beltaine party didn’t help matters.  She decided, since her family was extremely religious, and since she didn’t have a backyard and the swamp behind my house wouldn’t do (thank goodness; it held too many memories for me at the moment), that our little pagan celebration was to take place at a local park in town.  We each had to bring a selection of flowers, ‘plucked from a wild field or growing naturally in our yard’.  I think the ones I brought were technically weeds.  After the initial prayers and thanks she gave to the gods and goddesses (all names I now recognized), we sat around in a circle and recited some sort of chant.  When parents started dragging their curious children away, muttering something about ‘freaks’ and ‘rotten teenagers’, I knew the festivities had just begun.  Well, at least the weather was finally nice again.

When Michaela, Veronica, and half the cheerleading squad arrived to practice, I wondered if I could conjure up flying pinecones again.  Of course, there wasn’t a single pinecone in sight.  Luckily, the strange droning of our voices blocked out most of the horrible girls’ shrill laughter and crude remarks.  After a while they got bored and moved on to a different part of the park to commence with their practice.

The one good thing that did come out of visiting the park was that, once we were through with the ‘ceremony’, we left the grassy lawn behind and climbed down into the area where the creek was located.  The trees provided ample shade and for some reason or another, my nerves felt more at peace there.  Perhaps it was the presence of the soothing stream, or the quiet of the shady trees.  Will and Thomas wandered off to explore the creek while Robyn, Tully, and I picked a low hanging sycamore limb to relax on.

“So, spill,” Robyn said as she tossed the remains of her flower garland into the lazy water below.

I blinked at her, not knowing what she was talking about.

“The boy you’ve been mooning over!  I know he doesn’t go to our school, because, let’s face it, all the boys there are cretins.  And I’ve been watching you for the past two weeks.  You haven’t been making eyes at anyone.  So it must be an outsider.”

“Robyn! Thomas and Will are cretins?” Tully scoffed, folding her arms across her chest.

Robyn snorted, picking a leaf off of her old tattered jeans.  “No, but Meghan isn’t pining after one of them.”  She gave me a quick glance. “Or are you?”

I thrust my arms down against the tree trunk, nearly falling off. “No!  Thomas and Will are like my cousins.”

“Then who is it?  Have we seen him before?”

I sighed.  She would never let this go until I provided her with some information.  I really didn’t want to think about Cade for the time being, but perhaps I could twist the truth just enough to get Robyn off my back.  Besides, it’s not like they’d believe me if I told them the truth . . .

“Ugh, fine!” I hissed.  “His name’s C-Clay.”

Uh, Clay?
  That was the best name I could come up with?  I gave a mental groan.

“Oh, do go on.  What does he look like?  Where did you meet him?”

To my utter disbelief (and relief) Robyn, and Tully even, bought it.

I proceeded to tell them everything about ‘Clay’, his blond hair and brown eyes, how shy he was and how I was taller than him.  The exact opposite of Cade.  Paranoid person that I was, I didn’t want to risk my friends catching a glimpse of Cade and recognizing him as Clay.  That would be disastrous on so many levels.  So far I had managed to keep all of the chaos of my Otherworldly self separate from my normal, human self.  Okay, maybe not so normal, but still.  Whatever being Otherworldly meant for me in the long run, I didn’t want my friends mixed up in it, especially after Cade’s insinuation that I could be leading a very dangerous existence.

“ . . . well, I think most boys our age are shorter than you, Meg.  Don’t listen to Robyn.”

I caught the tail end of what Tully had been saying, but it didn’t matter.  They had believed my ridiculous story and now that their curiosity was satisfied, they might actually leave me alone for a while.

We stayed in the park until sunset, and then we all piled into Thomas’s minivan and headed back home.  Tully and I were the last ones dropped off and as we waved goodbye to Thomas, I caught a glimpse of something lurking in the bushes.  My stomach clenched and I looked over at Tully.  She hadn’t seen it.  Of course not.  Was it happening already?  The threat Cade had warned me about?  Was an army of faelah going to pour out of the trees at any second and tear me to shreds right there in the middle of the street?  I was suddenly petrified, but I couldn’t let anything happen to Tully.  She was my best friend.  I had to be the brave one.

“Well, I had better get home,” I said through a nervous cough.  “Still have homework to finish.”

I darted my eyes towards the bushes again, but the thing was gone.  It didn’t make me feel any easier though.

“K, bye,” Tully said.  As she walked up to her front door, she looked back at me once more.  “I hope things work out with you and Clay,” she said with a smile.  “Maybe we should all go to a movie or something?”

I was too distracted by my sudden fear, so I didn’t quite hear her.  “Sure, maybe.  We’ll see,” I babbled as I waved goodbye.

I started up the street at a fast pace and kept my eye on the landscape behind me.  Ugh, if only we hadn’t stayed out so late.  Twilight was creeping in and the grey shadows of the trees provided lots of hiding places for anything with malicious intent.

I was sure Tully gave me one of her looks before disappearing inside her house, but I was too distracted to notice.  Once I was sure she was safely inside, I started running.  I moved as fast as possible, my ears prickling to catch the sound of pursuit.  I was three doors down from my own house when I heard the loud padding of feet and the panting of a large animal just behind me.  My heart rate went up, making it hard to breathe and move my legs.  And then, for some strange reason, I looked behind me.  Hadn’t I always been the one, while watching horror movies with my friends, who screamed at the main character not to slow down or look behind them?  Hadn’t I told them how stupid they were, that if they had just kept going they would have made it inside the house in time to lock out the machete-wielding villain?

Well, turns out I was well ahead of my pursuer.  I would have made it, except the shock of seeing it turned my legs to jelly.  It wasn’t one of the Cumorrig, nor was it a pack of those demonic gnomes or that vile squirrel I had seen chatting with the raven.  This thing was far bigger, about the size of a bull, but it looked like some horrible mutation of a human and a goat.

It walked upright and its eyes were huge and milky white.  Rotting teeth that came to a point filled its mouth.  Thick mats of black and gray fur hung from its neck and head.  Its torso was that of a man, but from the waist down it looked like some monstrous, skinny goat, cloven hooves and all.  Three long, spiraled horns protruded from its head and when it screamed, a fetid smell filled the air.  I couldn’t keep a sob of fear from escaping my mouth.